This paper explores the use of captivity in Italy’s response to recurrent “migration crises” at the southern border of the European Union.
It first considers the case of Lampedusa, where migrants are often warehoused awaiting deportation, despite regulations requiring a swift transfer to the mainland. This practice periodically turns Lampedusa into an open-air prison for both migrants and residents.
This highlights the paradoxical juxtaposition between the temporal urgency intrinsic to the concept of crisis and the protracted limbo in which arriving migrants and border communities are purposefully kept. As Khosravi and Yimer argue in their short film Waiting (2020), waiting is an instrument of domination, power, and control.
This interdisciplinary study draws on ethnographic research and interviews, as well as film analysis. We address “captivity as crisis response” as a simultaneously urgent and perennial question, and a set of processes underscoring the need for postcolonial perspectives on today’s border dynamics.